Ronin Warriors Fan Fiction ❯ Mockingbird ❯ Mockingbird ( One-Shot )

Disclaimer-I will never own Dais, Cale, Sekhmet, and/or Anubis. Everyone belongs to his or her respective owners, producers, voice actors, etc. The title of this letter is taken from the song Mockingbird, which is sung by Eminem, and is taken from his CD, Encore. Mockingbird belongs to Eminem and all such people who are associated with the following song.

 

Mockingbird

Isabel Night

 

Dear Cale and Sekhmet,

 

I am sorry for not writing this letter before Anubis' funeral ceremony, but after enduring all the highly-charged emotions that seem to materialize around our Ogre's gravesite, I felt that now would be an appropriate time to pen this letter…with the expectation that you two are doing well.

 

I…wish to apologize for putting the both of you through at least four hundred years of damnation. I am aware of the fact that all of us have done things that we should not be proud of, but as the oldest of the four seasonal warriors, I had the responsibility of looking out for the three of you, just as an older child would do for his or her younger brothers and/or sisters. I should have done a better job in protecting the three of you from our former master…and the Ronin Warriors, but I was more concerned about our status within the Dynasty, as well as how we were perceived by our master that I never stopped to think about the consequences we would have to pay…

 

Even back then, as we were being taken for fools, I never wanted any of you to realize or envision me as an “older sibling” who cannot protect those he calls his own. Thus, I did everything possible to keep us together…even if it meant drugging people, manipulating their memories, murdering prisoners of war, and/or even kidnapping the person or persons in question. Many mortals would find my reasoning for doing these things ridiculous, but I swear to you that all of my actions were formulated, with the belief and hope, that we would remain together until spring, summer, autumn, and winter no longer cycled. I do not care if humans chastise me for my actions; they were not a part of an assassination group who took great joy in killing many rivals, lords, and warriors for money. Their gasps of shock mean nothing to me, as I am a man who has casually exterminated living creatures before…and would be more than happy to do so again…

 

I am confessing this to the both of you not because I want you to think of me as a man who would murder anyone on a whim, but…the truth is…when the Kami bestowed upon us their unique blessing; the one that granted us wealth, power, and privilege, they also gave me something special…something worth more than any amount of gold or silver could ever give me. They gave me the ability to feel alive, and I would have never traded that feeling, much less the bond that fed those feelings, for anything in either world. I did not care if I had to murder, torture, rape, and/or drug anyone in mortal world just to keep us together, I did what I had to do to stay emotionally alive. If it made me a monster in the eyes of my victims, then I became a monster for the sake of us, the four Dark Warlords. Now…all that blood, joy, laughter, pain, and emotional “highs” that I once bathed in…were for nothing. I swear before all eight million deities that I never wanted Anubis to die, and that I never wanted the two of you to go through a funeral while I was still alive, but I made a conscious choice to ignore our little redhead's warning about our former master…and now I must accept the responsibility and consequences of my actions.

 

End result or not the pain I feel at this present moment does nothing to ease the exhaustion this four hundred fifty-six year old body seems to be suffering from, and of course, the fatigue only gets worse whenever I do not hear the sound of Anubis' laughter…or the echo of his footsteps dashing around the castle halls. At this point in time, I fear that the only way I will be able to go forward with my existence is to clasp tightly to the memories that we once shared…and then never move forward with my life so that I will never have to pay the price that Enma will demand of me at my death.

 

Speaking of memories, do either of you remember the time when I overslept and did not rouse until eleven in the morning? Our leader was so furious at my lateness that he pounded at my door for a good five minutes in a vain attempt to stir me, and when all that noise did not work, he snuck into my room and placed one of those blasted mortal contraptions called an “alarm clock” under my pillow. I might not have told the two of you this, but when our little crimson-haired child slipped that contraption into my room, he decided to set the volume on that thing as loud as he could. The next thing I remembered was jumping out my bed, uttering a few words that a general of my rank should not speak, and then attempting to strangle the youngest of us. I was very irate with my leader because of his little prank, but I can only recall our commanding officer laughing so hard that his face turned as red as his hair…

 

It almost seemed like we were four different people back then: we laughed together, trained together, fought together; moreover, we promised that we would always be of one heart until the end of time. It is these memories that I long to have tattooed inside my brain, not the vision of a body hitting the castle lake's golden-colored water, and certainly not the recollection of a demon's boasting, to Badamon no less, about how he had controlled us like black and white Go pieces.

 

Thankfully, the war is over, and the demon that once toyed with our minds, hearts, and souls is dead. Nevertheless, the price we have had to pay for that freedom, the sight of our little spring's body lying inside a wooden coffin, makes my heart feel as if it has been ripped out by a rusted spiked gauntlet…and then burned inside a sword smith's furnace. Just as well, this ache is not capable of dulling the endless tears that seem to be streaming out of my eye, and the many questions that I have been asking myself, as a result of this burial, seem to have no answers. Does the pain of losing a loved one always feel this callous? In the end, was this justice? Or was our superior's death part of our victims' petition for vengeance? When the mourning period is over, will we start to seek solace in presence of other humans? Moreover, as time goes on, we ever replace the one immortal whom we let slip through our blood-soaked grasp?

 

I am very dejected with myself for not having all the answers to these questions; moreover, I am in unison with the both of you when I say that I wish that all this disarray were nothing more than a bad dream, which at sunrise, will fade from our minds like the Kami who ushers in the light of day. Then again, I am mindful of the fact that this pain is no finely crafted illusion, and I hope that this, our commanding officer's funeral, will be the last burial that we will have to participate in for many centuries to come…

 

Sincerely,

Dais

 

THE END

 

End Notes-I just want to thank everyone who has read and/or reviewed this letter. It means a great deal to me.